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The conservative agenda has dominated american politics since Reagan. Clinton did absolutely nothing but enable that agenda. Nafta, Media Deregulation, Defense of Marriage, Bono Copyright extension, Welfare reform. Here are some articles. Please take the time to read them. http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/arms/"So, once elected, Bill Clinton did what he does best: He took advantage of the opportunity. Rather than insert human-rights concerns into the arms-sales equation, as did his Democratic predecessor President Carter, Clinton decided to aggressively continue the sales policies of President Bush, himself no slouch when it came to selling U.S. arms. Early on, Clinton required our diplomats to shill for arms merchants to their host countries. The results were immediate: During Clinton's first year in office, U.S. arms sales more than doubled. From 1993 to 1997, the U.S. government sold, approved, or gave away $190 billion in weapons to virtually every nation on earth. The arms industry, meanwhile, has greased the wheels. It filled the Democratic Party coffers to the tune of nearly $2 million in the 1998 election cycle." http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/arms/lobbying.htmlIn 1993 Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) proposed that arms sales to Indonesia be linked to that country's human-rights record. Lobbyists immediately went to work opposing Feingold's proposal. As one complained to the Legal Times, "Every time a human-rights issue comes up, they jump on it and say, 'Let's cut off arms sales to Bongo Bongo.'"
The lobbyist then became defiant: "We'll fight Feingold; we'll fight each senator if we have to. The defense industry has to fight each one of these battles."
The Indonesian government's "registered foreign agents" -- its lobbyists in the U.S. -- disengaged from the fray and let American arms exporters do the fighting. The arms makers impressed upon legislators that tying arms exports to human rights meant the loss of jobs to foreign competitors. The State and Defense Departments phoned Feingold to let him know of the Clinton administration's opposition to the bill. The Feingold bill went down in flames."
http://www.kellysite.net/modrep.html
"Clinton was a disaster for liberals and Democrats because he was a closet Republican and was a major cause of the wealth and income gap that exists today between the rich and middle- and low-income Americans. Voters now identify his economic policies that benefitted investors and the wealthy at the expense of workers—primarily, but not exclusively, NAFTA, WTO and "globalization"—with today's liberals and Democrats. As they say, "Why vote for a Democrat if their economic policies are just as bad as the Republicans."
The Wall Street Journal agreed. From the November 7, 1996 issue:
"We have a great Republican president now."
A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard
Chairman of the Securities Industry
Association and head of Alex Brown, Inc.
"Here we are dead set in the center with a big long leash around President Clinton."
Hardwick Simmons
Prudential Securities Inc.
Chief Executive Officer
According to the biased-conservative-news-media, Clinton was right where Big Business wanted him: in the middle of the road between the Republican right wing of Congress, and the moderate Democrats in Congress.
In other words, The Wall Street Journal and America's right wing have successfully changed our definitions of balance and moderation. Traditional "Eisenhower Republicanism" (Clinton) is now considered moderation, and is almost nonexistent in the Republican party. Traditional "Truman Liberalism" is now considered extremist and is increasingly rare in the Democratic party.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/inequal/america.htm
The Rich Can Afford to Share the Wealth
By Robert Reich
San Jose Mercury News
December 29, 1999
" Which brings us to Big Thing Number Two: Almost all these gains have been going to people at the top. According to recent data from the congressional budget office, this year the richest 2.7 million Americans, comprising the top 1 percent, will have as many after-tax dollars to spend as the bottom 100 million put together. Meanwhile, the poorest one-fifth of households will have an average income of $8,800 this year, down from $10,000 in 1977 (in current dollars). Not even people in the middle have done particularly well. Since the start of the Clinton administration, the incomes of richest have risen twice as fast as the middle.
This calculation doesn't even include deferred income and other perks, such as stock options, which have gone mostly to people at the top. And, notably, it doesn't include increases in the values of their stock portfolios. Add in these, and the wealth gap turns into the Grand Canyon. At the start of the Clinton administration, the Dow stood at 3300. Now it's hovering around 10,800. Eighty-five percent of this windfall has gone to the top 10 percent of earners -- and forty percent to the top 1 percent."
http://www.flagpole.com/Issues/11.01.00/danperkins.html
"FP: Can you believe how the presidential race is shaping up? You've got Nader, whose probably saved millions of lives, who is being ignored...
DP: Well, he's been ignored until recently, and now suddenly - I read two or three different papers today that all have stories about him as a potential spoiler. So clearly this is the story that someone is putting out, and I find that really aggravating. To me, if George W. Bush wins, and the pundits blame Nader voters, to me that's blaming the victim. The Democratic party has spent the last eight years just alienating and betraying their core constituency. The Clinton-Gore administration has given us NAFTA, GATT, a continuation of the drug war, a terrible erosion of civil liberties. They've given us welfare reform. They've allowed this unprecedented concentration of corporate power with the various mergers and the telecom bill and so forth. I mean none of this is anything that's going to inspire loyalty among the party's core constituency. If you ask people who would traditionally be, and still are somewhat supporting the Democrats, who just want to vote for Gore as the lesser evil, if you ask them: "Clinton and Gore have been in power for eight years, name me eight things they've done that you actually agree with." And when I say that I mean things they've actually done - not just lip service liberalism, not just platitudes they've said about being for the people rather than the powerful - most people get stumped after the Family Leave Act. There hasn't been that much there for people. I think their constituency has grown completely disenchanted with these repellent politics of triangulation that they've been practicing. And if people are sort of turned off, and if they go to Nader because he actually seems like a vote of conscience if nothing else, I don't think you can blame them. I think that's blaming the victim. I think the only people Democrats have to blame here are themselves and their own appalling record."
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7310
"Following the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, Clinton hunted Osama with a passion -- but a passion circumscribed by the desire to protect the sheikdom sitting atop our oil lifeline. In 1994, a Saudi diplomat defected to the United States with 14,000 pages of documents from the kingdom's sealed file cabinets. This mother lode of intelligence included evidence of plans for the assassination of Saudi opponents living in the West and, tantalizingly, details of the $7 billion the Saudis gave to Saddam Hussein for his nuclear program -- the first attempt to build an Islamic Bomb. The Saudi government, according to the defector, Mohammed Al Khilewi, slipped Saddam the nuclear loot during the Reagan and Bush Sr. years when our own government still thought Saddam too marvelous for words. The thought was that he would only use the bomb to vaporize Iranians.
Clinton granted the Saudi defector asylum, but barred the FBI from looking at the documents. Al Khilewi's New York lawyer, Michael Wildes, told me he was stunned. Wildes handles some of America's most security-sensitive asylum cases. "We said , 'Here, take the documents! Go get some bad guys with them! We'll even pay for the photocopying!'" But the agents who came to his office had been ordered not to accept evidence of Saudi criminal activity, even on U.S. soil.
In 1997, the Canadians caught and extradited to America one of the Khobar Towers attackers. In 1999, Vernon Jordan's law firm stepped in and -- poof! -- the killer was shipped back to Saudi Arabia before he could reveal all he knew about Al Qaeda (valuable) and the Saudis (embarrassing). I reviewed, but was not permitted to take notes on, the alleged terrorist's debriefing by the FBI. To my admittedly inexpert eyes, there was enough on Al Qaeda to make him a source on terrorists worth holding on to. Not that he was set free -- he's in one of the kingdom's dungeons -- but his info is sealed up with him. The terrorist's extradition was "Clinton's." "Clinton's parting kiss to the Saudis," as one insider put it."
http://www.theawfultruth.com/
"linton sure likes to talk about all those "new jobs" - problem is he doesn't mention where the old ones went. You remember them don't you, the decent-paying, unionized, factory jobs? Oh yeah, that's right, he continued the Reagan legacy of taking American jobs and sending them to third world countries where they can exploit the workers even cheaper!"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,813189,00.html
"I went to the White House when Harvey Weinstein was showing Clinton the movie Welcome to Sarejevo, which I was in. I got a few moments alone with Clinton. Saddam throwing out the weapons inspectors was all over the news and I asked what he was going to do. His answer was very revealing. He said: "Everybody is telling me to bomb him. All the military are saying, 'You gotta bomb him.' But if even one innocent person died, I couldn't bear it." And I looked in his eyes and I believed him. Little did I know he was blocking humanitarian aid at the time, allowing the deaths of thousands of innocent people."
And this very insightfull timeline from Frontline.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/unscom/etc/cron.html
"16-19 December - Operation Desert Fox: bombing commences against Iraq. The House vote on impeachment is delayed." |
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